Tag: Wild-systems

They say that money makes the world go round. But how does it work, and how has it changed over time? While developing the ECO Coin, we’ve been thinking a great deal of money, past and present. From the origins of civilization up to present day, economy has gone through countless shakeups, and yet we tend to take our current way of thinking about money for granted. Welcome to the second part of The Story of Money: Shells.

People, dogs, chimps and self-driving cars. What do they have in common? Well, they all have the ability to learn. In fact, Uber built a fake city called Almono, in Pittsburgh, to train self-driving cars and vehicle operators. This town is full of fake houses, mannequins randomly crossing the streets and chaotic intersections.

They say that money makes the world go round. But how does it work, and how has it changed over time? While developing the ECO Coin, we’ve been thinking a great deal of money, past and present. From the origins of civilization up to present day, economy has gone through countless shakeups, and yet we tend to take our current way of thinking about money for granted.

So, we’ve put together the story of money: an accessible roadmap from prehistory to digital age – from cows to credit, from gold mining to bitcoin mining. The series consists of six parts, each one exploring a different age: livestock, cowry shells, gold, paper, plastic and bits.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have news for you: the robots are not taking over the world. Humans are still in charge”, announced India’s disarmament ambassador Amandeep Gill, who chaired a meeting at the United Nations Convention on Conventional Weapons to discuss the development of autonomous weapon systems.

In response to growing concerns about autonomous weapons, able to identify and eliminate targets without human control, a coalition of AI researchers and advocacy organizations released a fictitious video that depicts a disturbing future in which lethal autonomous weapons have become cheap and ubiquitous.

If you are a fan of the Game of Thrones series, you’re probably aware that the promised next instalment, The Winds of Winter, is taking a long time to write. Now one fan has become so impatient for the conclusion to George R.R. Martin’s epic, he has programmed an AI to write it for him. Move over, George!

Computers are smart and, thanks to artificial neural networks, they are getting smarter. These networks, modelled after real neurological systems, allow computers to complete complex tasks such as image recognition. Until now, they have been impressively tough to fool. But one group of researchers claims to have found a way to reliably trick these networks into getting it wrong.

The science of robotics is a swiftly advancing field. We are inching ever closer to artificial intelligence and robot workforce. But do we really know how and where robots fit into our lives? Are robots tools, coworkers, or friends? And will this change in the future? A new report from the EU’s legal affairs committee recommends that we clarify the legal status of robots sooner rather than later. It even suggests that they could be given a form of personhood and rights.

We’re familiar with the term virus referring to both biological infections and to similar infections meant to affect computers. But researchers at the University of Washington have discovered a new and surprising conflation of these two ideas: the possibility of encoding a computer virus into a strand of human DNA. We know how it feels to catch a cold, but how does it feel to catch a malware?

Do you recognize this street? Small chances you do, as this street simply doesn’t exist, it was generated and drawn by an AI. Researcher Qifeng Chen from Stanford University, California, employs a supercomputer to create images of streets and spaces from its artificial memory.